what you want on this earth
by v-volatile
Summary: Eliot knew about restarting hearts, in a metaphorical and literal sense. They were two people whose lives were circumnavigated by the absurdity of their professions, and now they were on the same team. Emotional defibrillation, he supposed.


"And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth."

-Raymond Carver

***

The world for miracle, in Serbo-Croatian, is _začudni_. The bit with the c sounds like "ch". Eliot knows this because once he once saw someone use a portable defibrillator on a little boy outside of Srebrenica, and his mother, who had never seen such a machine, thought that the medic had caused her son to rise like Lazarus. She took her newly conscious son into her arms, threw herself at the medic's feet and screamed, _"Draga moje lubav! Začudni! Začudni!"_ She had probably only started using electricity in the sixties, out in the mountain villages; how could she have known that it was force that could restart a human heart?

Eliot knew about restarting hearts, in a metaphorical and literal sense.

He was pretty good, especially under pressure, at finding the kind of narrow mental place that allowed him to do his job well. Much of his training as a grappler and a fighter was about mental places. Much of the preparation he underwent to administer torture – and learn to withstand it – was the same. This was about turning your heart off. This was about alienating people. This was about failing to actually see them as human.

This was also about learning to be alone, and to take pleasure in being alone, in a manner that would be downright abnormal in any other context. Eliot knew that one of the reasons he was drawn to Parker was her well-developed sense of how to be alone. He liked to know that if he had to fly to Somalia on short notice or go underground overnight, she wouldn't waste away pining for him, but would move forward relentlessly, an object in space hurtling to the edge of her own lonely universe, dominated as it was by account balances and bowls of cereal and contingency plans.

He liked that she took a bit of an extra interest when he got hurt—that protective instinct wasn't totally stifled in her—but she would never get in the way of him doing his job. Never, no matter how much she inwardly winced at the danger and pain of it. Sometimes he wondered if she winced at all. In any case, she knew how important his work was to him.

They were two people whose lives were circumnavigated by the absurdity of their professions, and now they were on the same team.

Emotional defibrillation, he supposed.

***

One of the strangest things was waking up with someone next to him. It was strange enough living in luxurious civilization like Nate's loft and his apartment, year round. Strange, also, to be in Portland, full of organic food and smiling yuppies and paved roads and tasty water and not nearly enough violent crime. But to wake up next to Parker was even stranger. They were both light sleepers. He always went to bed dressed and she rarely did. Sometimes he would shift in his sleep and his eyes would slip open for a groggy moment and she would be laying there on her side, fully awake, staring intently at him, boring holes with those baby blues, the sheet cast off the top half of her body. That was usually enough to wake him up.

***

For the first time in his life, he was dating someone he could not sneak up on, and for the first time in her life Parker was dating someone who might commit a felony purely on instinct if she were to sneak up on him. They gave one another physical attention face to face, forward. Things were deliberate. Parker was known to walk up to Eliot, regard him for a long moment, and then kiss him stupid, ever so deliberately. He was a deer in headlights, watching her saunter up to him, a little smile growing on his face even as he was paralyzed waiting for the touch of her hands to his face.

That aversion to surprise didn't mean that they didn't have some good times, though. They were kinetically inclined, physically talented, excellently graceful. They learned by moving, by practice, and that was how they learned one another's bodies, too.

***

They discussed the possibility of meeting one another's families.

"I don't have any family," Parker had said, matter of factly. She was hanging by her knees, upside down, from a sleek fitness machine he kept around which he sometimes did pull ups on or resistance exercises. They were in his apartment, watching tv.

"I bet that's not true," Eliot had replied.

"There are people somewhere in America who might tell you they were my family," Parker said, and paused, "but they would be lying. Fosters. I don't have any. Just me."

"Okay," Eliot said. "I want to take you home to my momma." He was trying to be serious but he felt a little silly saying it. This went over Parker's head.

"Is this a milestone?"

"_What_?"

"Sophie said that when one person of the two people wants to bring their lover home to meet family it's a 'milestone' in the relationship. She never told her family about Nate. Though Maggie knows about Sophie? I don't know? I think we're winning," Parker notes, smiling. She swings herself up and drops back to the floor, hopping over the couch to join Eliot. "I like winning."

"I like winning too," Eliot agreed, filing the milestone comment away, reminding himself to thank Sophie for teaching Parker how the humans thought about their lives, how normal people organized their experiences. He wondered if it made sense to her. He put an arm around Parker and kissed the top of her head as she slouched down and put her sock-feet on his coffee table.

"Where does this momma live?" Parker inquired.

"South Carolina."

"Horse country?"

"Some of it."

"_Murderous. _I'm going to rely on you to make sure that none of the horses get near me."

"I should take you riding," Eliot said absentmindedly, and felt Parker shiver a bit with dislike.

"No," Parker declared.

"Okay," Eliot replied, deferring. He didn't care if she didn't like horses, or riding them. She liked him even though he made money putting the fear of god into people who were sometimes-most-of-the-time innocent (well, except for lately with this Leverage thing) and that was what mattered.

"Do you think about life before Leverage?" Eliot asked her.

"Not very often. I think about the old jobs as things I did, that I'm proud of, but I don't think about life, about the day-to-day part. I don't think about tying my shoes or eating breakfast or sitting on airplanes, no."

Eliot didn't know whether he should try to clarify his question, or whether she had understood him perfectly.

"What about you?" She asks. This is a skill Sophie has taught her: you can make people have nice conversations just by turning around a simple question. Parker thinks this is cheating, but it always works, so she's made it a habit.

"I don't think about tying my shoes," Eliot says with a low chuckle, and then, more seriously: "I think about the things I did and I wonder if they were largely mistakes."

"You don't seem like the mistake-making type. Did you get caught?"

"No."

"Then they weren't mistakes."

"Parker, it's not that simple. There's a moral component."

"Why does that matter?" Parker snapped at him. She hated this theoretical brow-beating, but he seemed to revisit it so many times. "If you could see into the future five years ago and know it would be a mistake back then, then you shouldn't have done it, and it would be a mistake. But if five years ago the things you were doing made sense, then they made sense…so, not mistakes."

Eliot let his head fall back against the couch and kept his mouth shut. He remembered too much. He wondered if Parker forgot a lot of things, just so that she could be that way, so white and black, so clearly _right_. He, on the other hand, remembered children's faces and screams and blood and broken bones and the slick slap of gunfire in the rain and the look of searchlights on mountainsides, the feeling of a desert ambush. These tattoo-permanent sensory secrets of warfare were in the core of his body and the way he kept them there was to keep running, and keep fighting, and keep struggling.

It had taken him months to stop sleeping with his boots on. He kept that same go bag from the field, full and packed up, on the floor in his closet, just in case. He walked the world armed not only with his own vengeance but also sometimes with weapons concealed on his person. This, especially, was the act of the traumatized, the act of someone who had not quite escaped the fog of war. Most of the time, with the exception of when he was active on a job, he had no need for ceramic knives or paranoid backtracking, but somehow he couldn't shake the habit.

The TV flickered at them and Parker slouched further into his arms on the couch, snuggling into him, looking like she might sleep. Or at least have a catnap. By posture and feeling Eliot recognized this as one of those delicious, valuable moments when she was supremely relaxed, her guard down, her mind clear. He kissed the top of her head again and she reached up to hold her palm to his cheek for a moment, acknowledging him.

He knew that men who had come back from combat were violent at home. This was one of the reasons he wore himself out by training, and forced his mind to calm down when Parker and Hardison got on his nerves. He said he would never hurt family—and now they _were_ his family, it was true, but some things seemed to happen to him no matter what his intention was.

Looking down at Parker, whose eyes had fallen closed for a moment, Eliot thought of how he used to be so good at being alone, and now he was the one who pined. She looked beautiful when she was relaxed. He wanted to stay stuck here for a whole day. He wanted Parker to roll and squirm in her sleep in his lap and he wanted the game to come on the TV so he could watch it while threading his fingers through her hair and gently rubbing her back. Then she'd wake up and be hungry and they'd go to the kitchen where Eliot would sauté something for them, and chastise her for pouring so much salt on her food.

***

Once he fought a boxing match every week for a month, because he was thinking about Myanmar too much, and training for the fights took every last bit of brainpower right out of him. Parker came to watch. She hung on the ring-ropes like a pro trainer when he practiced and cheered like a long time guy friend on fight day. She got into it. One weekend he won in the fifth round, and by then his face was busted up and bloody, and she was in there in the locker room with his coach as they tried to fix him up and ice him down. He sat, back to the wall, motionless as he was ministered to, looking at her through double vision.

"You kicked ass," she said, and smiled at him like she knew his secret plan. Weakly he smiled back. She had no idea how good it was to hear 'you kicked ass', instead of 'oh honey doesn't it hurt' or 'why do you do this to yourself' or 'I'm too scared to see them hit you I can't watch!'. This was usually how women were when he did these things. Mikel had been an exception, but even for him, fucking someone who'd snipered you in cold blood was quite a complicated mental gymnastic. And not at all sustainable. Mikel was on the other side of the world now anyhow, and Parker was here with him.

Parker held his ankle in her hand like a talisman as she knelt in front of him and applied ice to his cheek. On the other side his trainer injected a numbing agent at the opposite temple and stitched him up. His eyes locked with Parker's unsteadily. She smiled a big smile, nothing but pride, the smirk of victory. He loved her and for a moment things seemed very simple.

***

He was making a nice bowl of ramen one night, in the middle of slicing up the pickled daikon, when he heard his door click open, no sound of any key turning. Instantly he was on guard, knife out, ready to go, when she spoke: "It's me."

"It's you," he replied, trying to keep the relief out of his voice, and he put down his chef's knife and swept into his entryway and wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off her feet and kissed her neck.

"Oooof," she mumbled. "Still me."

"I know," he mumbled back. He held onto her for a long time, setting her back down on the ground but not letting go.

"What's for dinner?" she finally said, instead of 'what's wrong?' because she was Parker. This broke him from his reverie.

"Soup," he said, and she smiled like he had said money, darting into the kitchen to check it out.

***

"there isn't enough of anything

as long as we live. But at intervals

a sweetness appears and, given a chance

prevails."

— Raymond Carver (Ultramarine: Poems)


End file.
